The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [236]
consisting of battalion defence areas, anti-tank areas and support points, and systems of obstacles, consisting of three lines of trenches (up to five lines in most important sectors), interconnected by communication trenches. Second zones, six to eight miles from the leading edge of the zone, were laid out in similar fashion. Rear defence zones were situated at about twenty-five miles from the leading edge of the defence zones… The whole system consisted of no fewer than eight defensive belts existing over a depth of between 120 and 180 miles.17
Furthermore, 2,200 anti-tank and 2,500 anti-personnel mines had been laid across every single mile of the front, a density four times that which had defended Stalingrad and six times that of Moscow. In all, 503,993 anti-tank mines and 439,348 anti-personnel mines were laid by the Red Army prior to the battle of Kursk. Lieutenant Artur Schütte, a tank commander in the Grossdeutschland Division, was pardonably exaggerating when he said that the minefields he had to cross were laid so densely ‘that it would have been impossible to put even a medal between them’.18 Mellenthin recorded that the Russians could lay 30,000 mines in two or three days and that ‘it was no rare thing to have to lift 40,000 mines a day in the sector of a German Corps’.19 This was laborious, time-consuming and dangerous work for the German engineer corps but vitally necessary, though it could never be 100 per cent successful.
The hundred days of waiting before the German attack also gave the Red Army plenty of time to build miniature fortresses, reconnoitre the battlefield, gauge the depths of fords and strengths of bridges, and to train day and night. By the time they had finished, noted the chief of staff of XLVIII Panzer Corps, they had ‘converted the Kursk front into another Verdun’.20 Furthermore, Mellenthin complained that the terrain in the southern sector across which his 300 tanks and 60 assault guns had to attack was not good tank country, with ‘numerous valleys, small copses, irregularly laid out villages and some rivers and brooks; of these the Pena [river] ran with a swift current between two banks.’ Walking the battlefields of Kursk and taking the journey known as the Death Ride of the Fourth Panzer Army alert one to the fact that Mellenthin slightly exaggerated the ‘valleys’, which are little more than undulations. As he himself admitted elsewhere, ‘It was not good “tank country”, but it was by no means “tank proof”.’21 The ground rises slightly to the north between Belgorod and Kursk, further aiding the defender.
It was an unusual luxury for the Russians to be able to prepare to this extent. ‘At the beginning of the war everything was done in a hurry,’ commented a Red Army tank captain, ‘and time was always lacking. Now we go calmly into action.’22 The Luftwaffe’s aerial reconnaissance, even allowing for Russian camouflage, ought to have been enough for Hitler to have stuck to his original instincts and look for somewhere else to fight, especially as Manstein hardened his view against the attack as time went on. Yet the all-powerful ‘Greatest Warlord of All Time’, as Goebbels’ propaganda machine was still describing Hitler, seems to have been persuaded by Keitel, Zeitzler and Kluge to set H-Hour for dawn on 4 July. ‘Independence Day for America’, complained Mellenthin afterwards, ‘and the beginning of the end for Germany.’ As a tank purist and theorist, Mellenthin could not bear to see the way that the Wehrmacht was fighting to Russian strengths, in the same way that had led to Stalingrad, rather than to its own, in the way that had led to the sweeping victories of 1941. ‘Instead of seeking to create conditions in which manoeuvre would be possible,’ he complained, ‘by strategic withdrawals or surprise attacks in quiet sectors, the German Supreme Council could think of nothing better than to fling our magnificent Panzer divisions against Kursk, which had now become the strongest fortress in the world.’23 It was as though they had chosen deliberately to attack the Maginot